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Friday, July 22, 2016

TrumpSpeak

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My title, as many of you will
recognize, is a variant of the word “NewSpeak” from George Orwell’s dystopian
novel, 1984. Whether one should
credit Donald Trump with coining a new form of speech may be questionable, but
watching his performance last night, I was struck not so much by the laughable
misrepresentation of almost all his alleged “facts” (if you want a good rundown
of how each of Trump’s ‘factoids’ were grossly exaggerated, de-contextualized
or outright lied about, see the Washington
Post piece here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/07/22/fact-checking-donald-trumps-acceptance-speech-at-the-2016-rnc/),
but by his speech patterns. (In case you’ve forgotten, one of the reasons
fact-checking doesn’t matter much for a Trump audience has to do with their
‘stone-age brains.’ Briefly, most people employ a quick, instinctive estimate, done
in milliseconds, of a politician’s looks and/or manner, and completely bypass
the reasoning process behind the information he delivers. This accords with the
stone-age brains most of us still work with in interpersonal relations.)

So,
for now, let’s bypass the howlers Trump spouted in his overly long but
factually empty speech, and attend instead to the patterns of rhetoric he used.
To begin with, the man seems to be mostly driven—both in his domestic critiques
and his foreign ones—by the notion of “getting a good deal.” This would figure,
since his life seems to have been devoted to deal-making in the high-risk world
of (mostly) Manhattan real estate. It is a world dominated by con men and
hucksters who are always out to screw the naïve or the unwary. The New Yorker,
therefore, must always be on his guard to make sure he’s not being screwed.
This applies to all New Yorkers in all areas of life, but especially to those
engaged in the dog-eat-dog world of real estate developing. Accordingly, Donald
Trump’s rhetoric is full of critiques of his predecessors like Hillary and
Obama and Bill Clinton for “not getting a good deal.” In his eyes, they gave
away the store in the Iran nuclear deal; they gave away the store in Libya and
Syria and Russia and China and especially in trade deals like NAFTA and the
upcoming TPP. In short, previous political leaders succumbed to the cardinal
sin in Trump’s world: they didn’t negotiate hard or cleverly enough; weren’t
willing enough to play hardball; weren’t willing enough to talk tough and walk
away and threaten and harangue. Now, of course, Trump has no way of knowing
this; he wasn’t there; has never been engaged in any diplomatic activity or
anything remotely political; and certainly is not about to consider the way
that the United States has totally dominated and exploited almost every
relationship it has entered in the post-World War II years. No. All he’s
willing to bray about is how weak the nation has become, i.e. how it can no
longer dictate the terms of every agreement due to its position as the biggest,
baddest, most powerful nation on the globe. So he claims that he, the great
real estate wheeler-dealer, will be able to make ‘better deals’—even,
presumably, with those shirkers at home who want a free lunch.

And
that brings us to the second noticeable rhetorical pattern. Trump never
explains exactly how he’s going to accomplish all this. All he does is, first,
exaggerate the problem—we’re besieged by criminals and loafers domestically and
by terrorists from abroad, our cities are falling apart, our industry has all
left for cheaper shores due to bad trade deals, cops are being murdered at the highest
rate ever—and then assert that he’s the one who, with his superior deal-making
ability, will fix the problem. Crime will end. Immigration will end. Terrorism
will end. Globalization will end. Inner-city poverty will end. And he, Donald
Trump, will end it.

But
how? These are complex, difficult problems that Republicans and Democrats alike
have been promising to solve for decades. Not for Trump. The language is
simple, the problems are simple, the solution is simple: Put Trump in Charge.
And soon, trillions of dollars will be pouring into the nation’s coffers, taxes
will be far lower saving everyone more trillions, roads will be built,
infrastructure will be modernized, onerous regulations will disappear freeing
up our energy sources (never mind the pollution or global warming) and pouring
in even more trillions, and American Will
Be Great Again.

It
is simple. And it is simpleminded. And the stone-age brains crowding the
Republican Convention could not cheer loud enough or stomp hard enough or chant
USA! USA! USA! often enough to roar their approval. Their devotion, even. Their
lord and savior was saying it. He was saying it with confidence and certainty
and with his jaw jutting out like some latter day Benito Mussolini, and they
were ecstatic (as Mussolini’s crowds often were). He would talk tough. He would
be tough. He would just take those
over-educated fancy-nancy diplomats and bureaucrats by the throat, saying ‘fuck
your reasoning and diplomacy and equity,’ and force them to give him a good
deal. And if they didn’t, he’d bomb the shit out of them.

And
that’s it. After the longest speech in convention history, Donald Trump managed
to say virtually nothing but the same posturing, simple-minded crap he’s been
spouting throughout his primary campaign. Leaving the rest of us, the ones
searching for some sort of program or plan or logic to his meandering speech,
to wonder: how can they swallow this infantile pap? How can they not see that
this guy has no capacity for any thought that’s longer than a sentence or two?
Did you notice that? He never stayed with one subject for any sustained length
of time: it was all quick cuts, as in a commercial. Crime in the streets.
Shooting cops. Terrorists. Hillary and Libya, Iraq, Syria, Egypt. NAFTA. China.
Back to high unemployment. Obama care. It reminded me of what was revealed in Jane
Mayer’s recent article in the New Yorker
where she interviewed Trump’s ghostwriter Tony Schwartz (he wrote The Art of the Deal for Trump)—i.e. that
Trump had no capacity whatever to
focus on anything for longer than a minute or two. Trying to interview Trump,
said Schwartz, was like trying to interview a chimp with ADHD (my metaphor).
The man had no capacity to concentrate at all, so Schwartz ended up following
Trump around, listening in on phone calls and interactions and inspections, to scare
up material for the book. The other thing Schwartz noticed—after Trump
threatened him with a lawsuit and demanded that he return all the royalties
Schwartz had earned from the bestseller—is that Trump’s famously thin skin
demands that he instantly attack anyone who criticizes him. We all saw that in
this Spring’s Republican debates. What Schwartz reminds us is how frightening
this quality would be in a President:

“The fact that Trump would take time
out of convention week to worry about a critic is evidence to me not only of
how thin-skinned he is, but also of how misplaced his priorities are,” Schwartz
wrote. He added, “It is axiomatic that when Trump feels attacked, he will
strike back. That’s precisely what’s so frightening about his becoming
president.” (Jane Mayer, “Donald Trump Threatens the Ghostwriter of ‘The Art of
the Deal’”, New Yorker, July 20,
2016.)

Donald
Trump, in short, gave one of the most consistently alarmist acceptance speeches
in American political history last night. But what we should truly be alarmed
about is ever ceding the enormous responsibility and power of the American
presidency to a man who is so ill-equipped—emotionally, mentally, and morally—to
handle it. For if, with the help of a gang of speechwriters, he is unable or unwilling
to put together a cogent argument that at least attempts to fill in some of the
missing spaces of TrumpSpeak, then every American with an ounce of sense
should be terrified about how those missing spaces might eventually take some reckless,
cataclysmic shape.

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About Me

Lawrence DiStasi has worked as a writer, editor, teacher and historian since graduating from Dartmouth College (BA) and New York University (ABD). He has taught literature and composition at Gettysburg College, the University of California at Berkeley, and most recently in the Fall Freshman Program at UC Berkeley Extension. Since 1994, he has been project director of the historical exhibit, Una Storia Segreta: When Italian Americans Were "Enemy Aliens," shepherding it to more than fifty sites nationwide, and spearheading the movement it generated to pass "The Wartime Violation of Italian American Civil Liberties Act", signed into Public Law #106-451 by President William Jefferson Clinton. His published books include: MAL OCCHIO: The Underside of Vision (North Point Press: 1981), Dream Streets: The Big Book of Italian American Culture (Harper & Row: 1989), and Una Storia Segreta: The Secret History of Italian American Evacuation and Internment during World War II (Heyday Books: 2001). He lives in Bolinas, CA.